Autodata Dongle Emulator Wikipedia Cz Software Protection Dongle
Autodata Dongle Emulator Wikipedia Cz Serial And Parallel

This is a form of tightly controlled licensing, which allows the vendor to engage in vendor lock-in and charge more than it would otherwise for the product.

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Autodata Dongle Emulator Wikipedia Cz Software Protection Dongle

April 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)A software protection dongle (commonly known as a dongle or key) is an electronic copy protection and content protection device.

When conncted to a computer or other electronics, they unlock software functionality or decode content.1 The hardware key is programmed with a product key or other cryptographic protection mechanism and functions via an electrical connector to an external bus of the computer or appliance.2In software protection, dongles are two-interface security tokens with transient data flow with a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle.

In the absence of these dongles, certain software may run only in a restricted mode, or not at all.

Apart from software protection, dongles can enable functions in electronic devices, such as receiving and processing encoded video streams on television sets.Contents1 History1.1 Usage1.2 Issues2 Game consoles3 See also4 References5 External linksHistoryedit This is the original dongle used on the cassette port of a Commodore PET computer to protect the Wordcraft word processor.

Autodata Dongle Emulator Wikipedia Cz Serial And Parallel

Other types of serial and parallel Wordcraft dongles A Rainbow Tech parallel port dongle PCB, front side.

Note the numbers rubbed off the chips to make reverse engineering harder A Rainbow Tech parallel port dongle PCB, back sideIn the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wordcraft became the earliest program to use a software protection dongle.3 The dongle was passive, using a 74LS165 8-bit shift register connected to one of the two tape cassette ports on the Commodore PET microcomputer.

The tape cassette port supplied both power and bi-directional data IO.The requirements for security were identified by the author of the Wordcraft word processor, Pete Dowson, and his colleague Mike Lake.

Through the network of PET users in the UK they made contact with Graham Heggie in Coventry.

Grahams knowledge of electronics helped to speed up their creation of a 74LS165 shift register connected to the tape cassette port which provided 5V power and lines to shift the bits into the software.

The shift register contained only 8-bits, but with lines tied to ground or 5V at random it could provide a random number between 0 and 255 which was sufficient security for the software.

The prototype was on Veroboard which dangled from the tape port edge connector on wires - and dangle eventually transformed into dongle.

When Wordcraft International was formed in Derby, UK, responsibility for manufacturing was transferred to Brian Edmundson who also produced the plastic moulding for the enclosure.

One of the greatest regrets shared by Graham, Pete and Mike was that they did not patent their idea.4Versions of the Wordcraft dongle were later produced for IBM 25 pin parallel ports, 25 pin serial ports and 9 pin serial ports.

Among the computers supported, before the arrival of the IBM PC, were Chuck Peddles Sirius Systems Technology Victor 9000, the ACT Apricot Computers and the DEC Rainbow 100.An early example of the term was in 1984, when early production Sinclair QLs were shipped with part of the QL firmware held on an external 16 KB ROM cartridge (infamously known as the kludge or dongle), until the QL was redesigned to increase the internal ROM capacity from 32 to 48 KB.56Dongles rapidly evolved into active devices that contained a serial transceiver (UART) and even a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host.

Later versions adopted the USB interface, which became the preferred choice over the serial or parallel interface.A 1992 advertisement for Rainbow Technologies claimed the word dongle was derived from the name Don Gall.

Though untrue, this has given rise to an urban myth.7Usageedit Daisy chained parallel port copy protection dongles.Efforts to introduce dongle copy-protection in the mainstream software market have met stiff resistance from users.

Such copy-protection is more typically used with very expensive packages and vertical market software such as CADCAM software, MICROS Systems hospitality and special retail software, Digital Audio Workstation applications, and some translation memory packages.In cases such as prepress and printing software, the dongle is encoded with a specific, per-user license key, which enables particular features in the target application.